There are pieces of white paper all over the class, it is like someone made confetti from another's note book. I sure am glad it isn't mine though, because i would really hate to show up in school with a sharp machete. It is break-time, not recess, because recess is what you say in America. Recess, is what you say in Americanized–Nigerian montessori schools where big men send their children to learn history and French and Poetry. For us, it is break-time. That obnoxiously short, time-racing period between late morning and early afternoon when teachers decide it is time for you to breathe something that does not include a totally irrelevant part of the human anatomy, a set of increasingly confusing mix of numerals, or a language you speak everyday but never seem to grasp completely.Was that tasking?...sorry.Today, it is also the period when the class is agog. Apparently, Dike Uzochukwu got into a fight with Ahmed Tombe. If

 His sketches look like anime characters. Fun fact: they are supposed to be Nigerians. The last pages of boy-girl's books are covered in them– layers upon layers of drawings. It's some kind of figure-drawing collage.He should be in an art school, he's really good.He made them into a comic strip. DEITY– he called it, and the protagonist's name is Echinabia, and he acts like a bum. All muscles and no sense.His notes are complete though, written in perfect, elegant calligraphy. It probably took him ages to pen these notes down.They smell of musk and a little like baby powder. I spend half my study time trying to imitate his looped handwriting. 

 Tuesdays Tuesday: the best day to be a student at L.F.A.Tuesday is the one day in the whole week we get to go out to the sun. The horizon is a peak of clear blue with sheets of white for clouds. So far up south-south you wouldn't think the sun could shine like this, in glittering gold-dust tendrils of light. Green; rows and rows of translucent green cover the field's perimeter, resplendent beads of water dot their fringes. Queen's greenery ran a marathon round the school, like an over-sized lawn at a giant's, it touched every patio, every block, every front door. Lorita and i used to lie in the grass at school behind the tuck-shop, when it just got mowed.It's always like breathing in sea-salt in a forest, all rolled up in a drop of sunlight. Lorita and i usually had splotches of dark green on our uniforms after. It was worth it.There's a small crowd around the field, and an even smaller crowd inside it; boy

 Recess is–sorry—break is over, before i can wink. He has corrected me like fify times since i last said 'recess'.Cool silence has overtaken the hallways again, like a cloud of warm fog. The place is a small barrack, with hefty seniors pacing the length and breadth of each class, slim pale cane-sticks are clutched like weapons of mass destruction. You could smell the burning energy radiating from their hosts; the unfortunate juniors whose classes they occupy. Fear and anxiety, so thick it drank the air. A hostage situation will look better."So i've been wondering, what's the meaning of your middle name.""Yara?""Yes.""It means little butterfly." That's what Mom called me. I remember her say it, with a smooth practiced ease that rolled off her tongue. Even i can't pronounce it like that.Chideziri tests it repeatedly until it sounds like 'gala'. "It's yara," I say "not gala." I doubt my parents wanted

After eating dinner–a huge cake of moi-moi i found in the fridge (Aunty seedy drove by when i wasn't in) and watching two episodes of MTV's Shuga Naija, i'm sprawled on the fur rug spread at the epicentre on the sitting room, looking through old albums on my phone.There's the picture of Lorita and i, at a Queens Christmas party, she has an over-sized santa cap on and a  we are grinning like cheshire cats. And there's another, it was at a Bole festival, where got each others names painted on our faces, hers in gold lettering, mine in black. It only made sense, my skin is a light brown, so weightless it could be called yellow, and hers, so dark that at some point she jokingly started to call herself "Blackie". We were each others ying and yang, and if data and video calls prevail, we always will be.But i'm not placing my bet on video calls or any network service, because if you have lived my life you'll know that people die, and people leave a